This was the first in a line of office calculating machines that made the Burroughs family fortune and enabled the son, William S. Burroughs, to pursue a career consuming hallucinogenic drugs and writing subversive novels like ‘The Naked Lunch’.
The Comptometer
The Comptometer: Press key calculating at last
A further step forward occurred in 1887 when Dorr. E. Felt’s US-patented key driven ‘Comptometer’ took calculating into the push button age. This machine, too, spurred a host of imitators.
The Curta calculator, which first appeared in 1948, was perhaps the ultimate expression of the mechanical calculator, so compact that it could, somewhat lumpily, fit into a pocket and capable of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.